


Greenhouse Glass

by iimpavid, It_MightBe_Love



Series: the batmom multiverse [2]
Category: DCU
Genre: Adoption, Childhood Memories, Crying, Family Reunions, Feelings, Flashbacks, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jewish Character, Mother-Son Relationship, Parent-Child Relationship, Piano, Reunions, Scent memory, Yiddish, deus ex alfred, the listed ship is irrelevant tbqh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-01-29 06:30:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12625215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/It_MightBe_Love/pseuds/It_MightBe_Love
Summary: It begins with the scent of plum blossoms, a ghostly overtone all but buried under the sweet and dying reek of an orchard in the first throes of fall.





	1. Chapter 1

It begins with the scent of plum blossoms, a ghostly overtone all but buried under the sweet and dying reek of an orchard in the first throes of fall. No one else smells plums, just half sour apples and overgrown foliage and earth, leaving Jason to stand, poleaxed, dazed, utterly useless for the task at hand. 

 

The League of Shadows will go on just fine without him.

 

He leaves.

 

Makes straight for Gotham, the cesspit where this nightmare began, a writhing mass of humanity incapable of destroying itself but hellbent on trying. Every street corner he knows should stink of dank rotting garbage, urine, old blood. Instead, all Jason can seem to smell is plums– and the warm sensation of a soft hand at his cheek, “ _you’re goin’ around your elbow t’ get t’ yer thumb, moonpie, here, let me show you_ ,”– he can’t remember what he was working on, was it an essay or dinner or a particularly tough piece for piano–

 

So much is missing.

 

In the papers, Bruce Wayne stands with his arm around April Miller and their adopted son– no it’s not an old article, he can see the differences between Tim Drake and himself plain as day. The Waynes and their new son. The newspapers have always been full of the Waynes, nauseatingly happy for photo ops at charity events, ribbon cuttings, cultural development and outreach– he hated, hated bowties– and this replacement doesn’t even have the good grace to look choked.

 

He thinks, briefly, he could help the kid out with that.

 

What gets him, what really sticks in his craw is on the fifth page in, written with no substance because Bruce pays well to have Batman shoved off the front page– a sugary testimonial on Batman and Robin saving some sorry soul’s life from a mugger because they just happened to be in the area. Not that gracious in Gotham Heights thinks that– as far as that asshole knows Batman has nothing better to do than keep an omniscient eye on every person who might get so much as pickpocketed. Ditto Robin.

 

 _Robin_.

 

Bruce went and got another one.

 

There’s no rest for the wicked and no peace for the kind to be had anywhere in the tri-state area so why would Jason do anything other than try to beat sense into his idiot… mentor? Master? Father?

 

If he didn’t know better he’d think Bruce didn’t have a goddamn clue what happened to him but it’s easier to believe Bruce doesn’t care. That thought makes something bleed in him and Jason’s developed a fondness for those sorts of somethings. He wouldn’t bleed if he was dead.

 

As comfortable as he is with killing… and it’s not the last dying flicker of hope that gets him so much as the knowledge that he has made an impact, something that will last and resonate… he flinches at trying to teach a lesson the Joker failed to impress upon Bruce. Shies away from the thought of how easy (it takes 25 pounds of force to break a human bone, less to wedge between the sutures of the skull, open the tender quarter inch of flesh between the hungry world and a person’s organs, sever a spinal cord, slit a throat), how painfully easy it would be to do.

 

He stalks through the city and doesn’t sleep. Can hardly breathe between the smell of plums and taste of graveyard dirt and the trembling rage of hurt that should have died with him.

 

He wasn’t very good at doing what was expected of him. He couldn’t stay dead and he doesn’t stay away from Wayne Manor.

 

The house is a mausoleum, tinted blue with the light of the moon through the few sets of curtains that haven’t been drawn, casting spidery shadows across the gleaming floors and up the walls. Jason slips between them silent as a ghost. It’s something of his specialty when he’s able to keep his mouth shut.

 

The light is enough for him to see that there are pictures of him everywhere. Not a single frame has been touched except to be dusted and the pictures of Tim Drake have been added in the free spaces.

 

His walks with unsubtle steps in heavy boots, unguarded rustling of clothes against holsters, not stalking or skulking– all the sounds of living– he’s lost his objective.

 

His wandering leads him to the kitchen.

 

The fridge, a silver behemoth twice a wide as Bruce’s shoulders (that Jason knows is full of fresh kosher ingredients and carefully frozen leftovers at April’s behest) is covered in pictures he doesn’t remember being taken. Polaroids with glue around the edges like they’ve been pulled from scrapbooks. He’s in most of them: asleep in uniform tucked up against Batman’s side, an end table packed with cold medicine just visible beside the couch. In profile helping Alfred prep for dinner, in this very kitchen, half-covered in flour and grinning off-camera. Half blurry in strip from an Amusement Mile photobooth that’s all Jason and April making a series of increasingly ridiculous faces, laughing and squinting in the flash–

 

More than he has time to think through and try to recall.  

 

The soft gasp from behind him is as loud as a gunshot in the silence of the Manor, on its heels a click and a flood of light through the kitchen. Jason turns around out of reflex, winces beneath his cowl– less at the light and more because it’s April who found him, wrapped up in a soft tartan robe and tired, so tired. She doesn’t look like she’s slept.

 

He stares. He could be out of the manor in fifteen seconds. Off the property in ten minutes if he put in real effort. But…

 

It isn’t so easy to run from her. It never has been.

 

She swallows, and steps around him to put the kettle on, “Sit,” and points at the table in the kitchen.

 

Jason sits.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> just a continuation of the previous scene. reconciling with family, adoptive or not, is always hard.

The limbo between fight and flight is novel-- it must be how his vitims feel when they're too utterly gobsmacked to function.

Except this, this is a softer fear, no metallic edges or flashing in the dark, only plum blossoms and the tea April is brewing and the pictures of a dead boy she and her husband have kept dust-free for years. April moves around the kitchen make tea stiff-backed and graceful and not even looking to see what her hands are doing. She’s making tea. It would be nothing else.

April watches the kettle come to a boil. Ambrosia tea leaves in a mesh ball hooked over the lip of a ceramic pot that warms when she pours the boiling water into it. Then from there into two mismatched cups pulled absently from the cupboard and when she sits, the ceramic clicks against the wood of the table. It's worn with age, gouged from tantrums thrown by Dick, by Jason. One corner burned from the last Christmas when Tim wanted to make cookies and put a hot pan straight to the surface without a hotpad.

He could leave. _Should_ leave. Would definitely do less damage if he would just  _get up and leave_.

But there are pieces of him that not even the Lazarus Pit has aged and they keep him sitting spellbound at the kitchen table while the rest of the house sleeps and April makes tea.

He thinks _this is a dream._

The only thing missing is a batch of shortbread cookies and Food Network reruns and his fourteen-year-old self trying too hard to stay quiet while he and his mother stay up together and keep the wee hours of the morning all to themselves.

Here on the far side of death April is still his mother in every way that matters. She taught him to sew buttons rather than skin, to cook old recipes, to speak and swear in Yiddish, to carry handkerchiefs, hold doors open for girls, hide venom in the sweetest smiles and--

She pours for the both of them. 

Jason stares at the cup in front of him. He grinds his teeth and doesn't look at her. But she's made tea. He can't go anywhere now.

Steam curls off the top of the cup into the silence between them. The only way out is through so he reaches for it-- then aborts the gesture. Clenches his fists, feeling like an idiot, before he takes off the helmet, the gloves, and picks up the cup.

She watches Jason's hands, the line of his shoulders, the strangely nebulous slick surface of the helmet before he yanks it off with a noise and drops his gloves next to it on the table. She sips at her tea like she isn't watching at all. Wisps of her blond hair are curling where they've escaped from the knot she hasn't loosened since she came home from work a few hours ago. He has a domino mask on underneath, her melodramatic boy.

The kitchen is the sort of close and quiet that makes her think of Jason at fourteen refusing to sleep because he was worried-- because what if all of this newfound life was a dream? What if he woke up and April had a lifetime of that and couldn't leave him be?

Jason watches the steam waft and dance some more, cheeks burning, and glances up at April. Her eyes are brighter than he remembers, a gentle and nearly-luminous green that always reminded him of the stars that'd decorated his closet door in the Crime Alley apartment a lifetime ago, banishing the unknown things in the dark. He can't think of a thing to say.

Words have always been good to him, he can’t have forgotten all of them, he’s going to blame this on the burning instead-- hot tea in his throat, hot shame in his cheeks, hot rage in the middle of his spine-- all of it smothered by this sudden reality. He swallows. He stumbles around his own teeth and tongue and can’t keep the plaintive notes out of his voice, “I-- I don’t know what to. Mom--”

April swallows and that's it-- him speaking is what does it and she leans forward to wrap her arms around his shoulders and choke back a muffled sob into the soft leather of his jacket. Grip firm but not tight.

He’s doing _great_. Not even five words into the family reunion and she’s crying.

“Mom, mom, don’t, it’s alright.” He can’t remember the last time he called her mom, if he ever said it outside of his head. All he knows to do is gather her to him, arms around her waist and-- when did she get so much smaller than him? That isn’t right. They were of a height, last he remembers.

Jason buries his face in her hair and the scent-memory of plum blossom finally puts itself to rest.

“It’s-- it’s okay, mom, okay? Please don’t cry,” he says, muffled into her shoulder and the warm fabric of her robe. He hopes that if he holds his breath it’ll mitigate how choked up he is, drawn tight and on the verge of shaking apart. There’s not enough of him left for that. If he kept his shit together busting out of his own casket, he can do this. He can do this.

April stifles a short laugh, the kind that gets tangled up with another quiet sob. Shoulders shaking with a subtle kind of violence. A tree in Autumn caught in the wind. This is her kid, and she isn't stupid, she knew when Bruce came back after the mess with the Red Hood, and the fiasco with the Joker being released from Arkham--

Well, Bruce has about all the subtlety of a distinctly unsubtle thing and he knows not to keep secrets from her anymore. The ensuing fight they'd had about _that one_ and resulted in several thrown ceramics and April spending three days sleeping in her office at the university.

But here? Now? This is her Jason, gun oil, kevlar and leather, a little dirty and he clearly needs to reacquaint himself with soap.

He keeps calling her mom, and he hadn't before. It only serves to make her shake and cry a little harder in all honesty and she doesn't possess the alacrity to tell him she isn't crying because she's sad. Though she is a little, at the loss of his childhood, at the trauma he's endured. Her little boy is a man grown now-- and when did that happen? It's been five almost six years and he's the size of a house now.

And the underlying hint of tobacco smoke and her kid.

She sniffles, draws back to rub a hand over her face and blink owlishly up at him.

Alfred clears his throat behind them and April jerks, draws herself back into her chair and tries not to appear as if she's just monumentally freaked out all over her kid.

Startled, Jason steps back into April’s space and turns toward— Alfred. Jason remembers him taller. He remembers his mom taller, too, it shouldn’t surprise him that Alfred’s not half as imposing as he always seemed to be… but it does.

Alfred hands Jason a handkerchief and sidesteps the table to pour them both another cup of tea before disappearing back into the shadows of the house.

“Thanks,” Jason says, a little lamely, and takes the handkerchief only to offer it to April. She looks lost after the interruption. He’s glad it’s not just him.

He pries off the domino mask with his fingernails. The spirit gum is a little hesitant to let go and leaves the skin around his eyes pink and tender. He drops it onto the table between his empty teacup and cowl. “So, uh,” he inhales and it’s a thick sound. He clears his throat, tries again, “What now? Tonight ain’t exactly gone according to plan.”

April takes the handkerchief, dabs her eyes and nose and once Alfred is gone, she cracks a smile, like sunlight splitting rainclouds and says- "God, you're all grown up." Choked off before she stirs honey into her cup, to distract herself for a moment and then, "You got no idea how much I've missed you moonpie."

The smile he returns is hesitant and he seems surprised to feel it. “Yeah, it’s been awhile, huh? I, I’m sorry.”

Beneath the kitchen table, his knee starts jittering up and down. He rakes a hand through his hair, streaking the white of his forelock in with the rest-- it’s about time to get it cut again— considers biting his nails but thinks better of it. His fingertips are enough of a mess, have been since he came back, because that’s what happens when you lose your fingertips to the fiberglass lid of a casket.

April snickers and says, "Yeah that's sorta what happens when you know-- time passes sweetheart." She swallows some tea and shifts to get comfortable in the kitchen chair.

He follows her lead back to the tea because he needs something to do with his hands to complete the circuit of energy buzzing through him. The stillness has passed but he can’t make himself leave now, either.

“Are you… have you been okay?”

"I...." she goes quiet, "Missed you is how I been. Honestly... nothin's been the same since you died."

Somehow, that’s worse. Worse than Bruce taking on another Robin, than if every single picture of him had been buried with him.

“I’m sorry, I,” his voice cracks, just a hairline sort of fracture that brings all his jittering to a halt and has him scrutinizing the grain of the scarred wood their mugs are sitting on. He swallows, sets his jaw before he tries again, “I shoulda been more careful. I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking.”

She reaches forward and wraps her arms around him again, kisses his temple and says, "Wasn't your fault kiddo. Not any of it and don't you ever go thinkin' it neither. You might be the size of a tank but I can still whup you."

“Only ‘cause I’d let you win."

April runs a hand through Jason's hair and draws back to go make him a grilled cheese, "You would, on accounta I'm amazing." And, "You stayin'?" Bites her lip and says, "Lemme make you somethin' t'eat an' we'll get you squared away in a bed for th' night?"

 “I don’t wanna keep you up, besides, I dunno how good of a idea it is for me to stick around. I’ve made a real ass of myself lately.”

She snorts, "And I ain't a real asshole myself? Sweetie, I ever tell you how I got Bruce to man up and date me for real? Cause it ain't real flatterin' to me."

“That’d be one helluva bedtime story but I dunno if I need more life-altering trauma.” His tea is lukewarm but it washes down the knot in his throat. He breathes and gets up to rummage around the fridge, pausing again over the Polaroids. “Did you concuss him with your shoes or eviscerate him on live TV?”

April laughs, tugs out bread and butter and cheese and the garlic salt and points the spatula at him, "Sit. I'm cookin' you somethin'," and pauses to shrug, "I mean it involved bein' caught on camera that's for sure." She grins, "I knew I was gonna marry him pretty early in… and Bruce? Might be th' world's best detective but that man's dumb as rocks when he puts 'is mind to it." She shrugged, "Must be a family trait. Th’shoe throwin' came later."

Jason doesn't sit back at the table but hops up into the counter beside the stove. "Jeez, I just wanted to help but if you wanna do all the work, fine."

April smiles blithely, pats his knee when he hops onto the counter and says, “I do. Lemme mom at ya for a minute or three.” While she could, while he was here. She wasn’t foolish enough to think he’d stay more than the night. Not with so much left unclear between he and Bruce.

Still, it was nice to make him grilled cheese with artichoke hearts and garlic, a little bit of bacon thrown on because it needed used to be up and Tim and Bruce both loved the stuff.

It's juvenile, sitting on the countertop, and it makes him feel better, makes it easier to play at their impromptu make-believe. He doesn't kick his boots against the cabinets-- the name of the game is quiet. They already woke Alfred up (or more likely Alfred knew Jason was there from the moment he set foot on the property) they can't take any more risks. "You tellin' me you proposed to him?"

“Not quite. But I knew I was gonna marry ’im pretty early on. Traumatized th’ hell outta Dick when I told him. ‘Course back then I think he figured me for one of them dumb society blondes Bruce was a’ways bringin’ home t’ cement his reputation.” She raised her eyes, pausing to gnaw on an artichoke heart, “Bright boys, dense as all get out, like anyone could peg me for a dumb society blonde.” She shook her head, “Took ’im another coupla weeks ‘fore he figured out I was th’ stayin’ kind. Wasn’t too hard to convince him it was all his idea neither,” her nose wrinkled and she handed Jason an extra slice of bacon.

(Jason decides he's going to have to develop the art of talking about someone without thinking of them. He'd like to stab Bruce-- a lot or a little it changes based on the day-- and it's hard to hang on to that when all he can think of is how stupid it was to steal the batmobile's tires, how Bruce could have done anything but instead he said, "Are you hungry?" The rest was history.)

 "D'you remember doin' this? When he first brought me home?"

Back then April'd thrown together something more substantial and Jewish than grilled cheese at the time, though, muttering in Yiddish-- presumably about irresponsible parents and how Jason was too scrawny. Some things transcend language barriers.

“I made blintz if I remember correctly, you had this look on y’face like it was a nightmare of th’ specially good variety. Like at any second you were gonna wake up.” Her smile is a little sad, but mostly fond, “You woke up next mornin’ all set t’flee and I sucked you into a piano lesson and then waffles an’ we fed you til you went into a carb coma and put you back t’bed.” She flipped the grilled cheese.

“I think Bruce thought he was gonna havta convince me t’keep you or somethin’ since Dick’d just moved out. Man never was one for straightforward. But I knew you were gonna be my kid. Wasn’t wrong neither.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

The dark is close and suffocating. A feedback loop of his own wet, heavy breathing.

Of all the things he hasn’t been broken of the fear of the dark is the worst.

Jason flails and fights against it and only when he’s come crashing onto the hardwood floor does he realize where he is, that he’d made the mistake of falling asleep with his head under the covers. The blankets have slid off the bed with him, trapping the heat of panic against his skin, and Jason kicks at them to get a breath of fresh air.

“Fuck,” he sighs.

The chill of the unheated room is immediate. His skin breaks out into goosebumps. He scrubs his hands over his face, palms catching on stubble, and he wonders if Alfred had the eerie forethought to leave a fresh razor out for him, too.

From here the queen-sized bed is massive and imposing, the wood floor stretching beneath it, gleaming in the dim unbroken except for the shadow of Jason and the blankets and one box shoved beneath the head of the bed. Jason rolls into his stomach and drags it out. It takes a firm shake for the contents to make a sound and that tips him from curious into needing to get it open now.

He’s too nosy for his own good.

It's one of the larger boxes from a boutique he remembers April enjoying, striped pale green with the name in gold foil on the lid. It's too big for just one blouse, probably held two or three outfits or maybe one of her gala dresses. Now it holds the softest, most battered set of clothes Jason's ever put his hands on, jeans and a thin shirt that feel one wash away from dissolving and a pair of sneakers that have busted open at the side seams, the heels. “J.T.” written on the tongue in fading sharpie, the initials warped and blurry from being written again and again.

* * *

 

He remembered hating how his feet were always wet that year.

It rained for two months straight. Sewers were flooding, slum housing collapsing including his favorite squats-- like hell was he going to be at home in the cloying damp that bred anger like a fungus.

The first dry night the air was thick with a cold that settled in with the water weight and it was better to go prowling looking for trouble than to sit somewhere shivering. He'd passed the alley the Batmobile was parked and maybe there was something in the water after all because he'd decided, fuck it, and set to work putting it up on blocks. The tires might sell but the rims, those were awesome-- between the retracting blades, articulated axel joints that allowed for who-knew-what-- he was gonna make bank. Not to mention the good it’d do for his reputation, stripping the Batmobile.

He hadn't counted that one impulse changing the rest of his life.

The next morning he’d woken up with the sun filling this same room. Alfred isn’t as subtle as he thinks. Everything from the cotton sheets with an astronomical thread count to the dust motes floating in the sun streaming through the window had to be a dream.

There was a piano playing, it’d woken him. Later he’d learn it was a Bach piano suite in A major. At the time it’d conjured up the feeling of the subway at rush hour in the middle of spring, where everyone in the city was dying to get where they were going but once in a while someone would stop at the top of the stairs, their attention caught and kicked up into full-blown wonder at some blooming tree.

He listened and he knew he had to leave now or he never would.

He made the borrowed bed as neatly as he could, dressed silently, and carried his battered shoes in his hands-- the soles had started to flap loose the week before and he hated the noise of them and there was no way Jason could have snuck out of a house that echoed that much with them on.

The piano played on. Lilting from one section to the next, always with happy continuity, sometimes swaying, others outright dancing, louder on the ground floor. He had the absurd thought What am I gonna do if Batman plays piano, then passed by the little corner room. He couldn’t resist peering through the half-open door.

It was April who played. April, who’d been inexplicably awake at ass o’clock in the morning to feed him, who he’d fought not to call “ma’am”, sat at the piano with her back to the door.

He stared. Her hair was down and he could see it was longer than he’d first guessed, falling inches past the bench she sat on, and swaying in time with the music with every movement of her shoulders and head. It was picking up now, dizzyingly bright and he could hardly keep track of the movement of her fingers.

Underneath the music, a clock chimed the hour, 7 a.m. on the nose. She must have gotten even less sleep than he had.

Jason swallowed the aching guilt that rose up at that thought and continued past only for silence to crash through the house as April stopped playing without warning. He jumped, the shoes falling from his hand-- he could see them falling in slow motion-- and thunk to the floor, one after the other. He felt their racket in his bones.

April asked over her shoulder, “D’you play piano, sugar?”

Wide-eyed and frozen in the doorway, he shook his head.

“Hm. C’mere and sit.” She turned back to the keyboard and started again, something different. Slower, warmer.

He stepped into the room-- it was a little library, he guessed, for all the bookshelves lining the walls, the overstuffed furniture. The piano April sat at faced the bay window, the ceiling above and inset walls curved just so and if Jason had to keep guessing, he figured it’d conduct sound better that way, like a phone playing music in a bowl.

April didn’t look back but scooted to the side of the bench and lifted one hand with a perfectly timed flourish to pat the seat beside her, her left hand still working.

The way Jason saw it, he didn’t have a choice, so he went. But he didn’t sit down. “I don’t know how to play.”

The song slowed further, April’s hands moving in graceful arcs across the keys on the two-thirds of them she could still reach from the left side of the bench. She gave him a sideways glance. “Sit.”

Jason sat and just like that April brought the music to a soft close. She told him, “That’s why you’re gonna learn.”

She started him smack dab in the middle of the keyboard, her right thumb depressing a white key with just the right amount of force. The note that rang through the little library sounded green to Jason, that same living shade of April's eyes, and not quite real.

"This's a C," April told him, then stretched her hand to hit another-- Jason counted-- eight keys to the right, played them at the same time. In a cadence so gentle he could hardly recognize it as a teaching voice, "That's a C, too, an octave up--"

He cut in before he could stop himself, "'cause of the Latin word for eight, or some shit, right?"

April arched an eyebrow. "The Latin word for "shit" is stercore," she replied. He thought he caught the edge of a smile before she continued on, "every note in between's D, E, F," she played each key in sequence as she named it, speaking more musically as she went. Jason didn't think she realized she was doing it. He didn't mind. He could listen to her all day-- "G, A, B, and back again to C. There's no real reason why they're letters 'cept people'd have a helluva time of they were numbered one to eighty-eight. 's hard enough to play piano as it is. Now, here, you try."

She'd been playing along the octave at a measured, languid pace while she talked and stopped to sit back, hands in her lap, to wait for him expectantly. He shook himself, coming out of the spell to blink at her and hesitate over the keys. What if he broke it? What if somehow, some way, he tried and the sound was so awful the piano caught fire? He was convinced stranger things had happened.

But April waited. Patience, he would learn in time, was her strong suit.

Jason sat up a little straighter, mimicking April's posture in the most intentional way, lifted his wrists just so because hers had seemed to float across the keys, fingers caressing rather than pressing them, and if that was how she did it he would avoid disaster by doing the same.

It was a clumsy octave. He couldn't get his fingers to move with precision let alone the effortless rhythm April'd kept rolling while she spoke. While. She. Spoke. It was some kind of magic.

April hummed when he finished, pleased like she hadn't heard the fumbled notes, the slipping of his fingers off their marks. "Just so, sugar, just so. Now go on an' play C, E, an’ G together, see how that sounds."

Jason wasn't looking at her, couldn't bring himself to because if he stopped looking right at that C she showed him he was gonna lose it in the sea of ivory. He nodded. Carefully noted which keys should match up with her instructions. It worked out to every other white key up from the C.

He raised his hands and hesitated-- and April took that moment to move him, adjust how he spread his fingers so he would get all the keys with one hand, no problem. "Remember, you gotta make two hands work for 88 keys-- cain't keep 'em next to each other like a coupla nervous raccoons. Now play that."

He pressed. C-E-G together were bright, green and yellow and reminiscent of something he couldn't name. He'd heard it on the radio but he couldn't remember where.

"And that's a C Major chord-- it's just about everywhere 'cause it sounds so happy people love it. You can build just about any song on C, E, an' G." She played it too, reaching around him something like three octaves down and Jason thought it sounded better. The same notes, sort of, but they sounded more when April played them.

She kept him stumbling along through chords until he could play a handful in something resembling an order even though he couldn't name them. Not yet. That was when she joined him in earnest and why Alfred found them an hour later, fumbling through a dressed down and stumbling rendition or "Twist and Shout", every other chord not quite right on Jason's end-- not that April seemed to notice at all. She sang along and didn’t look like she had a care in the world.

She and Jason caught sight of Alfred at the same time in the reflection off the bay windows. "Would you look at the time? I hope you're plannin' in stay for breakfast, Jason, you ain't experienced waffles until you've had Alfred's."

Alfred's waffles are chocolate chip. Bruce has strawberries with his and April gives him a look and he holds up a little atomizer bottle and says, "I'll use this if I plan to kiss you after eating." Before ducking down to do just that before he shuffles to the table.

April snorts and presses a kiss to Jason's temple, "Go on moonpie. Sit. Lemme introduce y'to the joys a tea." Alfred stifled a laugh-

"The Mistress has definite ideas about it young sir-" and April stuck her tongue out - "You ain't got a leg t'stand on Alf an' you know it."

Alfred continued his work with the waffle iron and April poked at the kettle. "I was showin' Jason how t'flirt with th'ivory an' ebony. S'got a good head for th'theory. Betcha he could tackle some more a th'complex stuff with a bit a practice he put his mind to it." She winked over her shoulder at him and Alfred laughed.

"The Mistress is a professor by trade-"

"I like teachin' don't be judgin' me."

"I would never. It is thanks to you that young Master Grayson has any aptitude for the piano."

"Only because I told'im I'd glue 'is ass to the chair he didn't make an effort."

"Yes- I do recall you did just that."

"I will not 'poligize for ruinin' them ugly jeans a his neither."

She swept to the table with a ceramic flowered teapot and four empty cups, a pot of thick sweet cream and a jar of honey.

"Bruce hates tea. Heathen, unless he's sick an' then coffee makes him gassy an' th'manor ain't big enough to deal with that man's flatulence. An' you ain't required to like tea neither so don't go pretendin' on my account. Alfred's got tastebuds t'compensate enough but th'only thing my mama an' I ever agreed 'pon was tea bein' th'sorta ritual what always made folks feel civilized."

Jason’s so busy blushing at the compliments (he’s done nothing to earn them) that April takes him completely by surprise. Joking about Batman— Bruce— getting gassy and carrying on about tea like it’s not utterly hilarious. He nearly chokes to death on waffle trying not to laugh.

“I’ll try it.” April could ask him to go skydiving and he’d probably agree to it. Jason’s aware that it’s a little stupid of him to trust her, to get so comfortable— but the food is good and he can stand to stick around until they go to bed. “Is it like coffee or what?”

* * *

 

It’s late morning when he finally emerges from his trip down memory lane, leaving the spare room, barefoot with his boots in hand. He means to sit on the back porch, the one facing April’s greenhouse, to put his shoes on and hit the road— only April’s already sitting out there, a mug of tea in her hands and dressed for gardening, dirt dusted onto her hands and the legs of her jeans. There’s a basket of vegetables by her feet, soil still clinging to them. She turns to look up at him when he opens the door.

 

“Hey,” he tells her, sits down beside her. 

 

“Hey, moonpie. You fixin’ t’leave already?”

 

He shrugs. “Thought about it. Haven’t decided on nothin’ yet— yanno, I thought about leaving that time you called babka.” 

 

She laughs, “She scare you off that quick?”

 

“Nah, this was before I knew who she was— she was just this lady in this ridiculous fur coat with these trunks big enough to stick a body in who came waltzin’ int’the manor like she owned the place. I lugged those damn things inside an’I sat down on the front porch ‘cause I coulda left but I didn’t wanna, even thought I knew I was in some deep shit.” 

 

“Yeah, you made some real’ awful choices f’dealin’ with your feelin’s that time ‘round,” April agrees, remembering no doubt the shambles he’d reduced her beloved greenhouse to. 

 

“You should probably give babka a call.” 

 

“Why’s that? You feelin’ th’urge t’take a bat t’my greenhouse again?” 

 

“It was a hoe. And no, I just, I dunno, I kinda wanna see her.” He looks away from April and out over the property— in time to catch sight of a roadster cruising along the winding road that led to the doorstep. He opens his mouth and April interjects, “It’s a good thing I a’ready called her,” pleased as punch.

 

He laughs, “Can you see the future now? Should we start callin’ you Oracle, too, ma?” 

 

She shakes her head. “See, far ’s I could figure, she’d wanna know you were alive and she could see you if y’stayed ‘cause she loves you t’ pieces. If you didn’t stay, well,  _ I’d _ be wantin’ t’see  _ her _ . Either way it made a whole lotta sense t’call her.” 

 

“I’m gonna hafta bring those trunks of hers in, huh?” 

 

“You’re gonna bring‘em upstairs to ‘er room, too, moonpie— your daddy’s at work and Alfred’s not as spry as he thinks he is. But don’t go tellin’im I said that.” 

 

Jason groans, “The things I do for love,” and pushes himself to his feet. If he’s playing butler for the morning he might as well be waiting for Katherine when she pulled up.

 

April calls after him, “I love you too, Jason,” and gets up to bring her haul of vegetables inside.


	4. Chapter 4

The only thing that makes sense is the Waynes are fucking nuts, Jason decides this somewhere in the neighborhood of four months in-- they just don’t know how things work.

His days shape up to be something like surreal between the carefully written lists of chores and assignments from April (she’s a professor and he figures she can’t leave work at work like a normal person— but Jason can forgive that all things considered) and training with Bruce. Actual training like a Karate Kid montage but with more bruises and cooler music.

It’s great.

It’s a dream and can’t possibly be real.

Jason’s compelled to go and fuck it up, naturally, but he can’t manage to do that right.

If his chores don’t get done, he still gets dinner. If he mouths off to Bruce it’s like talking to a wall. Mouthing off to April, she sits him down to explain why respecting people matters— or teaches him to swear in Yiddish if she’s feeling mischievous.

Jason breaks curfew three times too many and maybe cracks a few too many skulls out on patrol but hey who’s counting (Bruce is, apparently) and the Waynes revoke his television privileges. _What_ the fuck kind of punishment is _that_? He’s lived most of his life without TV he’s not exactly missing it.

Alfred catches him smoking on the roof (how the fuck Alfred got to the roof is beyond him— he had a hard enough time getting up there himself) and he has to write a research paper about lung cancer and emphysema.

When he deliberately fucks with the Batmobile for reasons even he doesn’t wholly understand, and summarily breaks it, what do they do? April locks her library, the one with the piano and the vast fiction collection he’s gotten very, very attached to— including his current read, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

And Jason, he stares at the locked door for all of ten seconds before he goes down to the garage for a drill and takes out the whole damn lock and handle, leaving it on the table in the hall before he goes in and grabs his book. And several others just because he can.

That evening Bruce walks into Jason’s room without warning, plucks the book out of Jason’s hands and the extras from his nightstand, “Your dinner’s getting cold,” and walks back out, closing the door behind him.

Jason shouts after him, “What the fuck, Bruce, I was reading that!”

He doesn’t go downstairs for dinner.

When he wakes up in the morning his place is still set at the dining room table, a lid over his entree because these are rich people and they can’t do anything normal. It rubs him the wrong way, makes him feel a little sick to see, one place set at an otherwise empty table, so he takes the whole shebang into the kitchen and packs the leftovers neatly into the Tupperware brand containers April and Alfred keep in the cupboards. He washes the plate, cutlery, and the stupid fucking lid.

A week later, the new lock comes off the library. He attempts a brick written by a guy named Steinbeck and leaves Twain alone. (He won’t finish Huckleberry Finn until years later, after he’s died and come back and figures it’s okay to pick it up again.)

He didn’t think it was possible to miss the sensation of spitting out his own teeth but something’s gotta give— it’s not like he’s contributing, alright, they can’t keep being this nice forever. He wants to ask them what’s wrong with them, what they think they’re doing going easy on him, what’s coming that’s so bad they’re going easy on him for now. But he keeps his mouth shut because part of him likes it, the pretending before the other shoe drops. It’s all that part of him that’s a fucking baby and actually bought it every time Willis brought home dinner to butter him up for “work” or Mom tried NA for a weekend before the withdrawals set in good and had her clawing at the walls and convinced he was full of centipedes and other shit that needed to be dug out—

The point is. Jason isn’t stupid. He should know better.

The sick feeling never quite goes away. It stays and it spreads. Every joint in his body feels full of fluid and burning hot. He can’t sleep for the way he’s buzzing. There’s a hornet’s nest rattling around in his head and he keeps shaking it to see when the swarm will emerge.

Leaving him home alone is a mistake but he can’t bring himself to be kind enough to warn Bruce and April about it. He’s not as nice as they are.

The work April leaves him— a dinosaur sticky note on the fridge with a list of chores and a revision of that lung cancer paper— takes less than two hours of his morning. It might have taken longer if he’d tried harder but what’s the point?

He heads outside, more to wander the property than to do anything else. The sun’s banished most of the early spring chill and the mist is gone from the rolling hills that give way into forest on the back forty— Jason doesn’t know if it’s actually forty acres, doesn’t know what an acre is, but it’s what April calls it and that’s what it is in his head. He kicks around, listening to the hornets in his head and looking for somewhere to throw their nest. He finds no satisfaction in tree climbing or rock skipping or pilfering fresh fruit from April’s greenhouse with it’s old iron framing and gigantic panes of glass.

 _I should break one_.

It’s one of those thoughts that occurs to him a dozen times a day— _I should light the library on fire, break my own arm, steal this car, pawn that heirloom vase, headbutt that cop_ — but this time the hornets take up the thought and repeat it back and forth and backwards and forwards until he doesn’t hear the words anymore just feels the hot and swollen need to break something.

He opens the greenhouse door. There’s a hoe to his left and he picks it up, testing the weight of it. It swings a little crooked but he can compensate for that.

In the reflection of the glass he sees himself, cleaned up in new clothes that cost more than he’d ever made working every night of the week selling tires and anything else he had to offer. He’s put on weight. Gotten taller. His hair could stand to be trimmed.

Four months and he can hardly recognize himself.

In his reflection, Jason’s lips curl into a snarl. He cocks the hoe back and swings. 

* * *

 

 

Jason doesn’t get them all. Can’t reach them all. There are some dozen panes making up the highest facets of the walls and the ceiling of the greenhouse and there are no guns, not even a bb gun, so he has to stop there.

Panting with sweat dripping down his back, sticking his shirt to his skin in an awful itchy way, Jason drops the hoe.

He doesn’t feel sick any more. The hornets are gone. Without them, he feels empty.

Somehow it went from late morning to afternoon, shadows short against their bodies and the sun hot, so hot. It hardly feels like spring.

There are a dozen tiny glass cuts he can see on his arms, the backs of his hands, and he’s sure there are at least a few on his face. Glass and dirt in his hair, stuck to the bottoms of his shoes, scuffing a trail of scrapes from the garden to the kitchen sink and the first aid kit beneath it. Under the suture kits and splints and iodine he turns up cotton balls and rubbing alcohol. Jason uses a compact in the kit to dab at the cuts on his face— one in on his cheek still has a piece of glass bisecting the skin and bleeds a perfect line down his jaw when he pulls it out with tweezers. Distantly he thinks he’s lucky it wasn’t his eye. He should have worn safety goggles.

None of it hurts. He’s being heavy handed with the alcohol but he’s not quite there, doesn’t feel a thing. Not when he pulls splinters from the hoe from his palms. Not when he hears April come home, calling for him.

But there’s a direct line of sight from the kitchen sink out the window to the greenhouse and he can hear her stop breathing.

This is it. He drops another cotton ball into the trash can and doesn’t reach for another. His head is full of the chant, This is it, this is it, this is it--

He watches her look from him to the first aid kit to the counter to the window and back to him, the myriad of tiny wounds he’s wearing, down to the mess his shoes made of the floor and the shards he tracked in with the dirt. April inhales.

Jason is delirious with relief.

She tells him, almost too quiet to hear, “Go to your room, Jason.”

His heart is beating hard enough it feels like it's going to start all those fresh tiny cuts bleeding again— and they burn. One between the first two knuckles on his right hand, it’d been deep, some ricochet of glass and bad timing, and he can feel it up his whole arm, the skin too tight and weeping.

“Jason,” she says it firm to get his attention. She doesn’t raise her voice above that same low tone, “Go. To. Your. Room.”

Jason goes.


	5. Chapter 5

What is perhaps all the funnier about April's many and varied issues with her family, is that she is remarkably close with her grandmother. Kathrine Miller even in her old age is a force to be reckoned with. April takes most after her, in her non-public life. Full of weirdly terrible jokes, bizarre humor, poetry-loving, and too much hair for any reasonable person to have grown

April comes home to find the glass greenhouse Bruce built for her for their one year anniversary destroyed. She's very, very quiet.

The thing is, her therapist friend, Janine, says that kids coming from Jason's background, will eventually act out like this. April and Bruce have been preparing for it for months.

The greenhouse can be rebuilt. Plants can be regrown, but April is still angry. Anger is a totally normal reaction, she's kind of impressed by her ability to restrain herself because she wants to ask why that. Why the greenhouse where she and Jason were building memories.

Instead, she sends him to his room and calls her grandmother.

Bruce will see the greenhouse when he gets back from whatever business he's dealing with that day. Alfred brings her tea in the kitchen and closes the curtain over the sink, it has a direct sight line to the greenhouse in shambles.

Katherine Miller turns up the next morning in a 50s Yankee Doodle Roadster and a steamer trunk filled with clothes. She doesn't look a day past sixty, though she must be pushing close to ninety by now, glamorous as ever, as if she just stepped off the pages of a fashion spread-- she rings the bell.

The doorbell rings at half past six in the morning the day after he takes a hoe to the greenhouse. And it keeps ringing. So many times it wakes Jason up and he has to go downstairs to answer it— he doesn’t know where Bruce or April or Alfred are, hasn’t heard from them since he was sent to his room except for the soup that appeared outside his door for dinner.

The woman waiting on the porch looks like April, if she’d had grey hair and aged forty years. The bright green eyes, glittering with something not quite mischief, were the same. She begins with, “Oh you must be Jason,” all fond and a touch of something else. She gives him a smacking kiss on the cheek he doesn’t have time to pull away from before she slips past him into the house calling in Yiddish for April. Her ringing notes that make his head hurt. She’s wearing a fur coat that belongs in an old movie— she fits right in with the look of the manor. She must be family.

For a surprise visit, he can’t imagine worse timing.

Where she’d stood on the porch were two trunks, easily big enough to fit a body into. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put together that he’s expected to drag them inside and the whole while he’s doing it he’s wondering how the hell she got them out of the boot of her car in the first place. Jason leaves them by the door.

The morning’s cool and bright, no trace of yesterday afternoon’s heat to upset the stillness. He sits on the front step. The emptiness in his chest is no longer a relief— it's given way to fear that echoes around rebounding off his ribs and never quite making it out and there’ hardly any room for his lungs to expand. His ears ring with it. (He remembers telling Willis once that he never answered questions and accusations because his ears started ringing too loud to think. Willis took that as an invitation to help Jason learn what it really felt like to have his head ring-- one of Willis’s cupped-hand blows had blown out one of his eardrums according to the school nurse. That was when he’d still gone to school, back in the fourth grade.)

The driveway winds on and through the hills for a couple miles before hitting the gate, the main road and one of the things he’s never learned to do is hotwire a car.

Jason looks down at his shoes. They’re Converse. Bright red. New and not made for winter weather by any stretch of the imagination. Not necessarily comfortable to sleep in either— he hadn’t undressed, just sat on his bed and waited for an inevitability that hadn’t had the courtesy to come.

He takes the time to pick the tiny pieces of glass out of the soles. They’ve scratched the fuck out of the manor’s floors even though he’s tried to walk mostly on the carpet. It’s a good way to kill time, to float in the limbo between leaving and staying. Some of the shards slip through his fingers to make him bleed and that’s what decides it— when his shoes are clean he goes back inside because he has to wash his hands.

April and Bruce are in the kitchen already. Katherine and she speaking back and forth in rapid-fire Russian, oddly tilted. April doesn’t speak Russian often at home. (What would be purpose be when she trends toward Yiddish?) -- she and Katherine maneuvering around one another in the kitchen, both petite blonde women with near identical eyes and features. It’s good to see what April will look like as she ages, but it’s clear from the carefully blank way Bruce is composing his face, that it’s alarming nonetheless.

It’s a rule, he and April agreed upon- when Bruce first posed the question of actually keeping Jason, when he’d brought him home- that they’d be a united front against Jason’s inevitable behavioral problems. Bruce had already essentially raised one teenager. April’d just come in at the very tail end of it with Dick. She’d been twenty-four and had had no idea what she was doing with a kid. Hell, most days she still doesn’t. She doesn’t talk to her sisters, for all that April’s youngest, Mia, might actually be just a little bit older than Jason is currently, (a fact she tries very hard to not think about), she doesn’t have a whole lot of experience relating to kids. Or teenagers. April was an outlier.

But she reads enough, and she speaks enough with Janine, to know that eventually, Jason’s good behavior is going to end. “Probably in some really fantastical way. Kid sounds smart, he isn’t going to go the ordinary route.”

But April is close to her grandmother, they’re in unison making blintzes for breakfast, pan sizzling while April prepares the batter, and so when April had come home to see the greenhouse in ruins? She’d called Katherine.

Bruce had little to say on the subject, but April suspects that that is more to do with the fact that Dick had been a far, far easier child to deal with. April sidetracks for a moment to wind around the kitchen and kiss Jason on the temple when he comes scuffing into the kitchen, to steal a (grossed out) sip of Bruce’s coffee, before making her way back to the counter and her grandmother.

It’s the worst thing he’s ever had to do, go to the kitchen to wash up for breakfast. He knows he could go to any of the many, many bathrooms in the manor, his own en-suite bathroom, but there’s no point in stalling.

Every step brings back that sick feeling.

April and their house guest— maybe she’s April’s mother— chatting in a language Jason can’t quite place, Bruce occasionally commenting on the conversation. They don’t sound cheerful but they don’t sound angry either and the problem is Jason can deal with angry people all good and fine, same with the ones who’re maniacally happy until they turn around and throw a frying pan at you because your shoes squeak and it bugs them, but this calm?

Jason needs to wash his hands— there’s blood and dirt on them from picking glass out of his shoes and breakfast at April’s table is a cleanly affair. He sets his jaw, can’t quite bring himself to straighten out his shoulders. It’s fine, though, because he gets to swing the door open that much less. The kitchen is full of the sweet smell of frying, Bruce at the nook table the family uses when there are no important guests, April and her (mother?) working in tandem over the stove.

Jason can’t suppress his full-body flinch when April swerves toward him— but she only kisses him. He stares at her, heart pounding in his chest, before he remembers himself, what he’s supposed to be doing, and makes for the sink.

April pauses in her prepping to point at Jason, “Moonpie-- this is m’babka-- grandmother-- Katherine. Babka- Jason.” Introductions done, she settled the kettle on the stove and ducked Katherine’s swat when she reached for a piece of fruit. Grinning cheekily. “She’s gonna be visitin’ for a coupla weeks--”

Katherine muttered something in Russian and said, “Yes, and you and this husband of yours will take that honeymoon neither of you took upon the celebration of your nuptials. I have already said the villa in Italy is at your disposal.”

April rolled her eyes and the conversation devolved back out of English, taking the very clear tone of an argument.

Jason washes his hands carefully, fresh and old cuts stinging from the soap and warm water. He’s got the look of a startled deer when April says his name and he nods to agree before he hears what she’s saying. “Hi,” he says at the countertop behind Katherine, not quite looking at her because suddenly he knows in his bones that they’ve been talking about him. That that’s what all the talking was about. That’s why April and Bruce are leaving. Adds, “It’s nice to meet you,” because for all Katherine doesn’t look threatening he’s still got to be polite.

Katherine sniffs, “Boychick you look as if you’re about to be sent to the gas chamber,” shakes her head and says something at April that has the blonde woman making an affronted noise --

“We do not! We love him very much, if Bruce went and spawned with another woman I‘d love that child just as much as I do Jay--” back to Russian and Katherine laughs. Loud and bell-like and points at Jason--

“Boychick does not appear aware of this. April, masha, you haven’t been not talking again have you? Children require verbal assertions of love.”

April rolled her eyes and looked steadily at Jason, “Moonpie, you are loved, you are important, you are smart, and wanted, an’ deservin’ of this family-” and shrieks when Katherine reaches out to pinch her--

“Babka, prekrati!”

He’s not one to stammer but he does it now trying to figure out “I know that” (a lie) and “they didn’t do anything” (the truth) and comes out with, “I didn’t know.”

If he didn’t feel like an ass before, well, that about does it. In that moment it sucks horribly that he’s fully aware of the fact that there’s no monster down the drain hungry for boyflesh waiting to gobble him up— growing up is the worst.

Not that it stops Katherine from tapping thumb and forefinger together like pincers, pointedly enough that April sidles behind Jason and wraps her arms around him. He might be elbow deep in soap and water but she doesn’t care.

“See--” she says it pointedly and gives him a squeeze before muttering something at Katherine and returning to helping with breakfast. The kettle begins to whistle.

Jason doesn’t jump very hard when April hugs him. He hears her coming and figures the litany of hurried nice things is leading to it especially because his mouth isn’t working right and has decided to make him sound even more pathetic. But he still startles. Splashes just enough water to get her sleeves wet. “Oh. It’s— I’m fine,” he insists and leans back into the tight hug anyway. The morning is too weird not to.

And that--? That is just heartbreaking, and April is quiet for a second, squeezes him a little bit tighter, ignoring the wetness on her shirtsleeve, the same way she ignored the initial rage at her greenhouse being destroyed. It speaks volumes because April is the sort of control freak, who does not like mess, she rolls her sleeves up and ignores it.

He dries his hands and sits down across from Bruce. He can’t stop himself from leaning in, nodding in Katherine’s direction, to say, “Did you know about her?”

Bruce shakes his head. “She’s nice though, isn’t she?”

Katherine hems and haws, but eventually she and April settle back into talking, catching up obviously, over the stove while they prepare breakfast. Alfred is nowhere to be found.

**Author's Note:**

> [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/iimpavid)


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